Slack, Netflix, Pinterest crash and you can't blame the leap second

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the backbone of Netflix, Slack, Pinterest and thousands of other websites and services, appeared to suffer a widespread outage Tuesday. The disruption lasted more than 40 minutes, according to Amazon.

Slack, Asana, Netflix, Pinterest, and many other apps and websites that rely on AWS were suddenly unresponsive Tuesday evening. Newly-launched Beats 1 radio was also reportedly down more than 40 minutes.

The status dashboard for AWS, which reports service disruptions, was among the sites that were unavailable during the disruption. Amazon later acknowledged the "connectivity issues," citing an "external Internet provider," on its status dashboard but said AWS services are "not affected."

"We are currently monitoring an external Internet provider issue that is causing interrupted service connectivity to AWS services for some customers. AWS services are not affected and continue to operate normally. "

Amazon later updated the note on its status dashboard, saying the issues lasted approximately 42 minutes — between 5:25 p.m PT and 6:07 p.m PT —but that the company was " currently confirming that impact has been resolved for all affected networks."

The issue, which seemed to be widespread, though it didn't affect everyone, lead some to joke that Tuesday's "leap-second" was responsible.

The service disruption, though relatively brief, highlights just how many companies depend on Amazon's cloud services. Even the smallest of hiccups can have far-reaching effects. Amazon didn't immediately elaborate on the cause of Tuesday's problem but a post on Hacker News along with many Twitter users, claimed it stemmed from an issue with one of Amazon's EC2 servers.

Should we be worried that AWS has basically become a single point of failure for all the Internet’s best stuff?

An Amazon representative did not immediately respond to Mashable's request for comment, we'll update as we hear more.—-UPDATE, June 30, 9:50 p.m PT: Amazon updated the message on its AWS Health Dashboard with more information about Tuesday's disruption.

Between 5:25 PM and 6:07 PM PDT we experienced an Internet connectivity issue with a provider outside of our network which affected traffic from some end-user networks. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

The root cause of this issue was an external Internet service provider incorrectly accepting a set of routes for some AWS addresses from a third-party who inadvertently advertised these routes. Providers should normally reject these routes by policy, but in this case the routes were accepted and propagated to other ISPs affecting some end-user’s ability to access AWS resources. Once we identified the provider and third-party network, we took action to route traffic around this incorrect routing configuration. We have worked with this external Internet service provider to ensure that this does not reoccur.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.